What is Web Analytics?
Web Analytics is the process of collecting, processing, and analyzing of website data.
With Web analytics, we can truly see how effective our marketing campaigns have been, find problems in our online services and make them better, and create customer profiles to boost the profitability of advertisement and sales efforts.
Every successful business is based on its ability to understand and utilize the data provided by its customers, competitors, and partners.
Benefits of Web Analytics
1. Measure online traffic
Web analytics will tell you:
- How many users and visitors you have on your website at any given time.
- Where do they come from?
- What are they doing on the website?
- How much time are they spending on the website?
The analytics will divide all the sources of traffic and website conversions in an easily understandable way. Analyzing the data provided, a company will recognize which activities produce the most profit to the bottom line.
For example, we learned through data the effects of ranking higher on Google Search on a niche online store.
The analytics tracks how organic and paid traffic has been developing over time in real-time, and this will help a company invest their time and money more effectively.
2. Tracking Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate in analytics means that a user who has visited the website leaves without interacting with it.
A high bounce rate might tell us the following:
- The users didn’t feel that content was for them, or it didn’t match well with the search query.
- A weak user experience overall.
When a high bounce rate occurs on a website, it’s hard to expect a website to produce quality leads, sales, or any other conversions related to business.
Tracking and improving the user experience and making sure that the content is what the users want will lower the bounce rate and increase the profitability of the website.
Tracking different exit pages from the analytics will show the worst performing pages in the business.
3. Optimizing and Tracking of Marketing Campaigns
For different marketing campaigns, online or offline can be created unique and specific links that can be tracked. Tracking these unique links will provide you with details on how these marketing campaigns have been received by the users and if it’s been profitable.
By tracking everything possible, you will find potentially highly returning campaigns to invest more and cancel campaigns that are performing poorly.
Create easily unique links with Google Campaign URL Builder.
Unique links also allow tracking offline-to-online campaigns. For example, a business could share it’s a unique link in an event or utilize the link in mailing campaigns which effects could be tracked online.
4. Finding the Right Target Audience and its Capitalization
In marketing, it’s crucial to find the right target audience for your products and services. An accurate target group will improve the profitability of marketing campaigns and leave a positive mark on the company itself.
Web analytics will provide companies with information to create and find the right target audiences.
Finding the audience will help companies create marketing materials that leave a positive feeling to their customers.
The right marketing campaigns to the right audiences will increase sales, conversions, and make a website better.
5. Improves and Optimizes Website and Web Services
With web analytics, a company will find potential problems on its website and its services.
For example, a bad and unclear sales funnel on an online store will decrease the number of purchases, thus declining revenue.
Users must find the right content at the right time when they are on the site. Creating specific landing pages for different purposes could also help.
Tracking the performance of the mobile versions is an example of how to make a better experience for the users.
6. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Only through the utilization of web analytics websites can improve their conversion optimizations. The goal of CRO is to make users do tasks assigned to them.
The conversion rate is calculated when received goals are divided by the number of users.
There are many conversion a website should measure, and every business should measure those that are most important to their business.
A list of few conversion anyone can start with:
- Every step of a sales funnel (add to carts, purchases, product views, etc.)
- Leads
- Newsletter sign ups
- Registrations
- Video Views
- Brochure downloads
- Clicks on text-links
- Bids and offers
- Event registrations
- Spent time on a website
- Shares on social media
- Contacts from contact forms.
Improving conversion rates with web analytics, a company will improve its website’s profitability and return on investment.
Taking conversion optimization into consideration is always necessary, especially when increasing visitors won’t cut it anymore.
It’s impossible to grow the number of users forever.
7. Tracking business goals online
A thriving business and its website have to have clear goals it tries to achieve.
With web analytics, companies can create specific goals to track. Measuring goals actively allows reacting faster to certain events through data.
As important as creating goals is, it’s also important to know what goals any given business should track. Not every goal online is created equal, thus tracking too many goals could become an issue for a business.
Always track goals that measure the effectiveness, profitability, and weaknesses of certain events.
8. Improve the results from Google Ads and Facebook ads
Analytics has a major role when it comes to managing online advertisements.
The data tells us how much the online advertisements have produced clicks, conversions, and how the ads have been received by the target audience.
For example, discovering through data which are the most common mistakes of Google Ads, can drastically improve your results and increase the efficiency of your ads.
Efficient data collection will increase the results of online advertisements.
Web analytics enable the use of remarketing in advertisements.
9. Starting is easy
For most companies and websites, the use of Google analytics will be enough. Google Analytics is a free tool for web analytics that is fairly simple to install on any platform.
Google Analytics will give you quickly an overview of how your online business is performing.
Learn more why digital marketing analytics is crucial for businesses.
10. New Creative Ideas
Analyzing data gives a unique opportunity to find new perspectives within your business model.
Tracking your data will provide you with more insights about trends and customer experiences within your business. These opportunities could potentially be seeds for growth internally and organically.
For example, a newly written article that brings more organic traffic compared to the rest of the site. Knowing this early on could shift your marketing efforts into a more profitable path.
Free Tools of Web Analytics
In web analytics, there is a multitude of different tools with complex purposes for tracking anything online. There are free and paid tools for tracking general traffic and even more specific goals.
The most common tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console should be used by everyone that runs a website. Using other tools require more thought if they are really necessary for a business.
The more data a company has doesn’t equal for better and improved results. The worst-case scenario is that excess data will lead to bad decisions.
Choose only the tools you need to achieve a goal.
Google Analytics is the foundation of web analytics.
Google Analytics (GA) is the most important tool for websites to start collecting online data for web analytics.
Without the tool, it can become extremely hard to understand the following:
- Time spent on the website.
- What is done on the website?
- Breakdown of traffic sources.
- Effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
The faster Google Analytics is installed, the faster a business can create data-driven decisions that drive their online businesses.
Passively collecting data helps to recognize how business decisions have impacted the bottom line online. It’s important to understand what actions have produced the most for the company and reproduce and improve them.
In the image below, we studied how different digital marketing investments have produced traffic to our website. Then compared it to a time before the investments.
Combining the data with our current goals, we could create decisions where and how much to invest next.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a fairly simple to use tool that allows installing various web analytics and marketing tools and their management without coding.
Tag Manager enables a quick way to measure the website’s events that can be used in analytics.
Managing multiple scripts or tags on a website can become overwhelming and time-consuming quickly, therefore using GTM comes recommended.
Installing Google Tag Manager also improves site speed, because instead of multiple tags and scripts, there would be only one.
An added benefit to the use of GTM is that it removes the need to be in contact with the website developer every time you might want to test new tags.
Facebook Pixel
Facebook Pixel is a valuable tool for web analytics. It provides more data with a different perspective for web analytics.
Pixel easily tracks important events like purchases, leads, revenue, and many more.
Pixel is used for creating better Facebook advertising campaigns.
The more data has been collected with Pixel, the better audiences for advertisement can be created. The data will make Facebook advertising more efficient.
The Pixel also enables the use of Facebook Analytics dashboards. Currently, you will need to use Facebook Insights, which doesn’t need the Pixel to get started.
Look-a-like audiences in Facebook marketing require the use of the Pixel and, it also enables remarketing.
Learn more about Facebook Pixel.
Hotjar
The tool Hotjar presents visual data on how users behave on a website. It will provide a better understanding of your users when real-time data is present.
The heatmaps of Hotjar, for example, tells you the following:
- How a user has reacted to certain elements.
- Does the user react the way the website was designed?
- How does the user react to the goals given to them?
Using the tool will help you quickly see what works and what doesn’t to make your website a better experience for the users.
Through Hotjar, it’s possible to create queries that can be optimized for different target groups. The collected data will help in planning the necessary changes.
The tool is only free until the first 2 000 page views á day, though. (2020)
Web Analytics as a Service
In our service for web analytics, we start by studying your company and your current goals. Depending on the availability of the data, we start by either analyzing your website and its traffic or installing the necessary tools to start collecting data.
Next, we design and provide your business with actionable ideas to help you develop a better business online. Our goal is to find ideas that can bring your company to the next level today and tomorrow.
Through A/B testing, we find agile, sustainable, and creative ideas to match your goals.
Every result we find will be told precisely and transparently.
We help companies find their core strengths online and develop them.
We combine online data that matters:
- Google and Facebook Ads
- Organic traffic to improve search engine optimization.
- Social media marketing activity and traffic
- Brand monitoring online
- Website analytics
- Email marketing analytics
Engaio Digital consults with web analytics and provides companies with details on how to grow online and improve its current activities.